Back in the early days of coal mining, Welsh miners organised on a pit by pit basis.  But as the employers grew into larger combines, or made mutually beneficial agreements with each other, it became increasingly clear that the miners also had to unite.  So the South Wales Miners Federation and the North Wales Miners Federation were born. Though both affiliated to the Miners Federation of Great Britain, there was never any attempt to create an all-Wales union.  Did that mean they lacked a national consciousness?  Not at all. They were certainly aware of the differences between Wales and England and no doubt plenty were cheering on their home country in what was a golden era for its rugby team. No, the simple fact was that an all-Wales union would have served no useful purpose in their everyday struggle against the employers. It made more sense for miners in South Wales to unite with miners in Gloucestershire if all were governed by the same company.

We live in a very different world today. There are no massed ranks of unionised manual workers and unions are either small or serve many different industries so that solidarity is extremely difficult to achieve. Class consciousness has ebbed, the original workers’ party hardly has a worker on its benches, but the frustrations and difficulties of the working class are just as great.  This is the soil on which the far right has grown, but also Welsh and Scottish nationalism.

There are plenty of reasons for Welsh people to feel resentment at the way they have been treated by the English state. Edward II turned Wales into a colony where only the English were allowed to live in his new towns. Henry VIII’s Act of Union forced the laws of England onto the Welsh and banned the use of the Welsh language in law courts. And at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution it was common for employers to be English and in some cases again to ban the use of Welsh.

Welsh nationalists, however, have a vested interest in amplifying these resentments, while playing down the divisions, including the class divisions, within Wales. So it’s widely believed that the poverty in Wales is entirely the result of all Wales’s wealth being siphoned off to England, despite the grand houses of the coal and steel magnates here, or the fact that Penarth was once believed to house more millionaires than anywhere on Earth.  And the idea that a London government has no concern for Wales ignores the fact that London government also had no concern for the inhabitants of Grenfell Tower down the road.  Or the fact that house prices in Cardiff on average are twice those in Sunderland. So it’s not surprising that Anglophobia – dislike of English people in general, rather than English bosses or the English/British state – is rife on social media.

Tony Blair created devolution in order to head off the growth of nationalism and give the Labour Party permanent strongholds even when there was a Tory government in London.  The idea of another expensive chamber full of professional politicians was greeted with widespread scepticism in Wales, with barely a quarter of the population voting for it. But, despite low turn-outs in elections, its popularity has grown. Rhodri Morgan famously called for ‘clear red water’ between the Senedd and Westminster, although it has to be said that due to the conservatism of UK governments over the past twenty-seven years this wasn’t difficult.  Nevertheless, free prescriptions, the phasing out of PFI in the NHS, infrastructural improvements, support for Welsh businesses and the maintenance of a state schooling system free of business interests are some of the reasons devolution has been seen as advantageous. But you have to wonder how different things might have looked if Corbyn had won in 2017 while Labour right-winger Carwyn James was first minister in Wales.

There has, however, been one big downside to devolution which has arguably contributed to a degeneration of the left in Wales and to threaten the effectiveness of the new mass socialist party we are trying to create. In 2008, Rhodri Morgan popped a bottle of champagne on the steps of the Senedd to celebrate the fact that St Athan in the Vale of Glamorgan had won out over Cosford in Shropshire to get the PFI contract for a privatised military academy. PFI, privatisation, the military, multinational sponsors including Raytheon, the makers of delivery systems for cluster bombs – everything any socialist should be against. A campaign was quickly organised against it, initially joined by the then chair of Cardiff Stop the War, Leanne Wood – only for her to quickly leave again, claiming there was no point campaigning against a done deal. The truth, however, was that the Party of Wales refused to oppose the project. Of course not.  It was a victory for Wales. And as the nationalists in Ireland or Slovakia will tell you, if you want to be a successful small independent country, you have to attract the multinationals.

It has to be said as well that the Welsh government needed no help from London in cracking down on protest about the military academy. Organisers of a protest march were threatened with arrest if they did not comply with a police demand that the demo should not go through Cardiff city centre as agreed.

As it happened, the Westminster government cancelled the project on the grounds of cost, although it’s likely that even Tories baulked at the idea of rolling back this particular part of the state to let in private enterprise.

St Athan, however, remains a warning about the dangers of citing a supposed Welsh national interest. In devolved Wales, however, talking about ‘what Wales needs’ is the norm, as if a company director in a mansion in Lisvane has the same interests as a cleaner in Penrhiwceiber.  And the common refrain that ‘Wales cannot get what it wants’ because ‘the English’ are always in the majority suggests that not only the Welsh but also the English each have one common interest which is permanently at loggerheads. 

The main justification for this view was always that the majority in Wales always voted Labour but got Tory governments.  But the same has been true of many of England’s cities.  And the assumption that Wales would eternally be more left-wing took a serious blow when the majority in Wales voted for Brexit, unlike the majority of Londoners.

The left bears some of the responsibility for the drift from class loyalties to national ones. Of course it was always possible to make a left argument for devolution, federation or independence, and socialists have often supported national struggles, particularly the struggle of colonies to free themselves from imperialism. But in calculating which independence struggles to support it is always essential to consider the needs of the working class and the prospects for socialism. If a socialist government was elected in London and the far right got a majority in the Senedd and in their own interest were suddenly converted to the need for Welsh self-government, would any socialist support that? But that’s the problem with nationalism. It often starts with left-of-centre movements, and these movements may, as in Wales, claim to represent good (civic) nationalism against bad (ethnic) nationalism. But nationalism is essentially a tribal loyalty to a place. No-one can determine what form it might take, just as no-one can demand that right-wingers outside asylum hotels don’t fly the Welsh flag.

As the Welsh miners came to understand, when the enemy is united across national boundaries, so must the workers be. Furthermore, the wider the field of struggle, the greater the prospects for socialism, since our ultimate aim is the common ownership and fair and productive use of the earth’s resources, something which cannot be achieved in one country.

In post-devolution Wales, however, anyone who questions Welsh separatism is decried as a ‘unionist’. even if their aim is to destroy the British state. Most of the left of Labour groups took the view that the loss of Wales and Scotland would weaken that state, though it was certainly a big attraction that Welsh and Scottish nationalism might bring them lots of recruits. So it proved initially in Scotland where the rump of Militant led the Scottish Socialist Party and on the back of the poll tax campaign got a good foothold in the new Scottish parliament. But they could not compete with a nationalist party with a broader tribal identity. Similarly, in Wales, Plaid have a solid base in the Welsh-speaking professionals who have increasingly come to dominate Welsh civic life and thus the party remains the most likely beneficiary of the growth of nationalism. Despite its left face, the party is widely involved in the Yes Wales movement which celebrates Welsh business success and has pretty much eliminated socialism from the discussion.

The left of the Labour party in Wales is represented by Welsh Labour Grassroots, the ‘sister organisation of Momentum’. It has had a fair amount of influence on the Welsh political scene, but has lost key members with the widespread defections from Starmer’s Labour party; many are sure to be involved in Corbyn’s new party. Though WLG never had a clear position on independence, many of its members were sympathetic and, focussed on the Senedd, are likely to support moves to make the new party in Wales partly or wholly autonomous.

Overall, then, given the balance of forces in Wales today, it is highly unlikely that we will be able to create one mass socialist party for the UK; socialists in Scotland and Wales will not accept it and it’s clear that Corbyn and friends prefer a loose confederation of local groups. However, the possibility of three parties with potentially quite different methods and agendas is one our enemies will relish. Nor is it a healthy situation when socialists in the different countries have no involvement with each other’s issues, including, for English socialists, what is going on in the Senedd. A healthy party will be committed to a fair distribution of resources across the UK; how can this happen if the poorest areas, including much of Wales, are not subsidised by the taxation of the richest, which are concentrated in the south-east of England? A healthy party will also be focussed on the need to combat the prejudices, including national prejudices, which blight the working class: to fight parochialism wherever it exists, and like the Welsh miners who were once famous for it, to seek much more than what the nationalists offer.